This cultural-literary-social critique examines why, when a society moves from a repressive system of government wrought with censorship and oppression to a free state representing unlimited possibilities, the art once created and treasured by that population is taken for granted. Taking into account his own exile from Stalinist Romania, as well as the plights of such greats as Garcia Marquez, Breton, the Dadaists, Kundera, and Milosz, Codrescu issues a call for those living in a free society to reach beyond a benign reality founded in technology and commercialism by tapping into their imaginations and striving for a better, evolutionary existence.

Not every writer is lucky enough to have grown up in a hell.

Andrei Codrescu is one of the lucky ones. He can boast that he has suffered under the rule of a first-class tyrant. . . .What I particularly like about Codrescu is that he has not forgotten his first anguishes, still less his unanswered questions. . . A very interesting text

E.M. Cioran – author, The Temptation to Exist

The Disappearance of the Outside is a breakthrough in original thought on the central question of how to break through our self-reflecting mirrors

Lawrence Ferlinghetti